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Bottled water has attracted ample criticism on environmental grounds, mostly because plastic bottles end up in the waste stream. But there's another environmental cost: Transporting the water.
An article in today's local newspaper explained now Nestlé plans to tap some local springs near Nathrop (between Buena Vista and Salida in Chaffee County, Colo.) for its Arrowhead bottled water.
The company proposes to collect 0.3 cubic feet per second (about 135 gallons) and transport the water by truck to its bottling plant in Denver. That works out to 194,400 gallons per day. A gallon of water weighs 8.35 pounds, so that's 1,622,268 pounds, or about 811 tons, to be hauled from Nathrop to Denver every day.
The newspaper article said there would be 20 truckloads a day, but if Nestlé is really taking 0.3 cfs, then it will be more like 30 trucks. I called a local trucking company, where the manager told me that the maximum legal weight on the relevant highway, U.S. 285, is 85,000 pounds, or 42.5 tons. An empty semi tractor and tank weigh about 15 tons, she said, so the maximum payload would be 27.5 tons. Divide that into the 811 daily tons of water, and you get 30 loads per day.
Nathrop is about 125 miles from Denver, so the round trip would be 250 miles. With 30 round trips, full loads to Denver and empty runs back to Nathrop, that's 7,500 miles per day.
The trucking manger said the big diesel rigs get 4.5 miles per gallon on average, which includes both loaded and empty. So just getting the water from the springs to the bottling plant would burn 1,667 gallons of diesel fuel every day, or more than 600,000 gallons per year.
And that doesn't count the petroleum used to make the plastic bottles, or the fuel used to transport Arrowhead water from the bottling plant to the cooler in your neighborhood convenience store, or the energy used by that refrigeration.
Others can calculate the carbon footprint
left by
this process. But just the fuel consumption involved in
transporting Rocky Mountain spring water to the
metropolitan bottling plant provides another strike against
bottled water. Every liter of this Arrowhead water will
include nearly two teaspoons of diesel fuel, at minimum,
even though you don't actually drink the diesel.
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